Do Progressive and Geico need to think like hurricane insurers when it comes to self-driving cars?
The current state of the $200 billion automobile insurance industry consists predominantly of sales to the consumer, either directly or through intermediaries, and the subsequent risk assessment of human drivers and their vehicles. As one of the original consumers of massive amounts of data, insurance companies such as Progressive and Geico have used that information in the underwriting process. Much like modern machine learning or artificial intelligence, insurance companies collect accident data and find correlations to manage risk. Historically, the most important factor has been driver history, which leads to the all-too-popular “points” system.